This week's cheesecake serving is the Northrop P-61 Black Widow Night Fighter:

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Sunday Aircraft Cheesecake (P-3

One of my favorite aircraft of all time, the P-38 Lightning:

I ran across this neat Japanese site detailing the assembly of a remote-controlled scale P-38 while looking for this week's serving of cheesecake.

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Sunday Aircraft Cheesecake (B-5

This week, we offer up the Convair B-58 "Hustler," a supersonic bomber whose service was restricted primarily to the 1960s. (I linked a fun story involving this plane almost exactly a year ago).

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This week we feature yet another De Havilland aircraft, the DH-4.

I saw a plane very similar to this one, the Boeing 40B-2, at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry last week. The exhibit was accompanied by the following letter from Leonard B. Hyde-Pearson, an airmail pilot who died in a plane crash in a De Havilland mail plane on March 7, 1924:

"To Be Opened Only After My Death:
Capt. Leonard Brooke Hyde-Pearson, USAMS

"My Beloved Brother Pilots and Pals"

I go west, but with cheerful heart.
I hope whatever small sacrifice I have made
May be of some use to the cause.

When we fly we are fools, they say.
When we are dead, weren't half-bad fellows.
But everyone in this wonderful aviation service
Is doing the world far more good than the public can appreciate.

We risk our necks; we give our lives;
We perfect a service for the benefit of the world at large.
They, mind you, are the ones who call us fools.

But stick to it, boys. I'm still very much with you all.
See you all again.

It's always risky to open a new frontier. The next time you buckle into a commercial jetliner, remember these words of Captain Hyde-Pearson, since you owe safe, routine, air travel in large part to pioneers like him.

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With thanks to Your Maximum Leader for the recommendation, I present another De Havilland airplane this week, the Mosquito:

Quite an incredible aircraft. As a result of its molded plywood and balsa wood construction, this twin-engine plane, which was originally specified as a bomber, became one of the fastest, longest-range multirole fighters of World War II.

It packed quite a punch: in its typical night-fighter package, it carried four 20mm cannon in a belly mount and four .303 machine guns in the nose.

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This week's airplane is the De Havilland Sea Vixen:

As will become apparent in future servings of aircraft cheesecake, I find the twin-boom tail an attractive feature on airplanes.

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This week's entry is much more of an "interesting" than a "beautiful" plane. In fact, the plane is pretty homely but attractive in that odd way that only straight-wing jet fighters can be. The F-89 Scorpion:

This fighter, aside from having an interesting profile and decent performance for a non-swept-wing jet, was the USAF's first interceptor to be armed with air-to-air nuclear rockets.

You heard me right. In the 1950s, the Air Force developed an air-to-air missile (the AIR-2 Genie) with a nuclear warhead designed to take out an entire squadron of Russian bombers at a time.

The F-89 carries the distinction of being the first (and only) plane ever to fire and detonate a nuclear-armed air-to-air missile, on 19 July 1957. I've looked for pictures of the test-firing but can't find any.

Earlier Aircraft Cheesecake entries here, here, and here.

Update: One of Jonah Goldberg's "military guys" is holding an ugly plane contest. Check it out.

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This week's entry is the Chance Vought F4U Corsair:

I remember this plane as the "star" of the TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep, which I enjoyed as an eight-year old boy. The show was based on the experiences of American WWII ace, Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, related further in his autobiography.

This page has some links to the F4U Corsair's training films.

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I love airplanes. I especially love military aircraft, and even moreso unique-looking military aircraft. For the next couple of weeks, I will try to highlight an aircraft that strikes my fancy. It may or may not become a regular feature.

This week's entry is the Sukhoi Su-47/S37 Berkut:

What I like about this fighter is the forward-swept wing, something I find quite visually appealing in an aircraft. Whether the wing shape confers any performance benefits is open to debate.

Enjoy the pic, and let me know if you have a favorite aircraft you would like to see featured.

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In his comments to this post, Robert the Llamabutcher reveals himself as a P-51 man, over the, to me, far sexier P-38.

But we can find common ground in our admiration of the B-25 Mitchell. I especially like the B-25 "G" and "H" variants, with the nose-mounted 75mm cannon (a predecessor of the AC-47 and AC-130 gunships).

Aviation historian Martin Caidin wrote an entertaining, if fictionalized, history of the B-25 gunship in Whip, which I read many times in my teen years.

Another of my favorites -- developed but not flown in WWII -- is the B-36 Peacemaker.

(For earlier posts on aircraft aesthetics, check here and here).

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Stephen Green is back and blogging and links to this great set of pictures from a recent airshow at Edwards AFB.

My favorite is the side-by-side flyby photo of the A-10 Warthog and the P-51 Mustang.

Enjoy!

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Many of the bloggers I follow on a daily basis have appropriate words to commemorate the monumental accomplishment of the Wright brothers. Naturally, Rand Simberg has been busy, with articles up at Tech Central Station and National Review in addition to his own blog entry.

Rocket Man Mark Oakley discusses Rand Simberg’s "Airplane Scientist" article from TCS, and posts an opinion on why we have not advanced as far in space during the 42 years since the first manned spaceflight as we did in aviation during the 42 years
after Kitty Hawk.

Tim Sandefur, who has a sweet picture of an SR-71 and a copy of one of my favorite poems, High Flight, contrasts the triumph of the free, entrepreneurial Wright Brothers with the failure of the government-funded Samuel Pierpont Langley (a point also made by Rand Simberg in his several articles above).

Since Tim got High Flight up first, I'll have to resort to quoting some poetic prose from one of my favorite books:

Throttle forward again and the airplane swings into take-off position on runway two eight. The concrete is wide and long. The painted white stripe along its center is held at one end by my nosewheel, at the invisible other end by the tough nylon webbing of the overrun barrier. A twin row of white edge lights converges in the black distance ahead, pointing the way. The throttle moves now, under my left glove, all the way forward; until the radium-caked tachometer needle covers the line marked 100 percent, until the tailpipe temperature is up by the short red arc on the dial that means 642 degrees centigrade, until each pointer on each dial of the red-soaked instrument panel agrees with what we are to do, until I say to myself, as I say every time, Here we go. I release the brakes.

There is no instant rush of speed, no head forced against the headrest. I feel only a gentle push at my back. The stripe of the runway unrolls, lazily at first, beneath the nosewheel. Crackling thunder twists and blasts and tumbles behind me, and, slowly, I see the runway lights begin to blur at the side of the concrete and the airspeed needle lifts to cover 50 knots, to cover 80 knots, to cover
120 knots (go-no-go speed checks OK) and between the two white rows of blur I see the barrier waiting in the darkness at the end of the runway and the control stick tilts easily back in my right glove and the airspeed needle is covering 160 knots and the nosewheel lifts from the concrete and the main wheels follow a half-second later and there is nothing in the world but me and an airplane alive and together and the cool wind lifts us to its heart and we are one with the wind and one with the dark sky and the stars ahead and the barrier is a forgotten dwindling blur behind and the wheels swing up to tuck themselves away in my seamless aluminum skin and the airspeed is up to one nine zero and flap lever forward and airspeed two two zero and I am in my element and I am flying. I am flying.

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Mr. Sandefur posts his mea culpa and concedes that there are at least two cool-looking propeller-driven planes (personally, I wouldn't use the Gee Bee as the poster child for prop planes).

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Nothing with propellers can qualify as a cool looking plane? I know it's ridiculous to argue matters of taste, but allow me to enter into evidence a few more exhibits of "cool" propeller planes:

• P-38 Lightning


• P-61 Black Widow


• Again, the B-36 Peacemaker (which had jets, too, btw, like some bastard offspring of a B-29 and a B-52)


• The Boomerang
• The Long EZ (DIY aviation).


• And, of course, the Voyager

Don't get me wrong, I love jet and rocket planes, too, but I hate to see piston-engined, propeller-driven craft unjustly denigrated. (BTW, if you want to learn how to fly any of the old WWII warbirds, watch the training films here).

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Tim Sandefur thinks this is the sexiest plane ever constructed.

I, personally, am torn between the X-15 and the White Knight/SpaceShipOne.

Not exactly sexy, but one of the coolest-looking planes ever has to be the Peacemaker.

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Via AMCGLTD, I found this seemingly apocryphal story about Air Force bomber pilots teaching some US Marine aviators a little bit of humility.

(Setup: sometime in the 1960s, some Marine F-4 Phantom pilots, to escape a hurricane on the Gulf Coast, are temporarily stationed inland at an Air Force base and proceed to brag about how they are flying the fastest planes in the world and generally ragging on the "low slow" bomber pilots. Hint: the "bombers" these particular Air Force pilots were flying were B-58 Hustlers).

Of course the Marines should have just gone double-or-nothing whether the Hustler pilots could land on a pitching carrier deck in the dark.

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